David Bowie’s Filthy Lesson

For Bowie, art was inauthenticity all the way down.

January 11, 2016

After Andy Warhol had been shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968,
he said, “Before I was shot, I suspected that instead of living I’m just watching
TV. Since being shot, I’m certain of it.” Bowie’s acute ten-word commentary on
Warhol’s statement, in the eponymous song from Hunky Dory in 1971, is deadly
accurate: “Andy Warhol, silver screen / Can’t tell them apart at all.” The
ironic self-awareness of the artist and their audience can only be that of
their inauthenticity, repeated at increasingly conscious levels. Bowie
repeatedly mobilizes this Warholian aesthetic.

The inability to distinguish Andy Warhol from the silver
screen morphs into Bowie’s continual sense of himself being stuck inside his
own movie. Such is the conceit of “Life on Mars?,” which begins with the “girl
with the mousy hair,” who is “hooked to the silver screen.” But in the final
verse, the movie’s screenwriter is revealed as Bowie himself or his persona,
although we can’t tell them apart at all:

But the film is a
saddening bore

’Cause I wrote it ten
times or more

It’s about to be writ
again.

The conflation of life with a movie conspires with the trope
of repetition to evoke a melancholic sense of being both bored and trapped. One
becomes an actor in one’s own movie. This is my sense of Bowie’s
much-misunderstood lines in “Quicksand”:

I’m living in a silent
film

Portraying Himmler’s
sacred realm

Of dream reality.

Bowie displays an acute awareness of Himmler’s understanding
of National Socialism as political artifice, as an artistic and especially
architectural construction, as well as a cinematic spectacle. Hitler, in the
words of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, was ein
Film aus Deutschland, a film from Germany. As Bowie put it, Hitler was the
first pop star. But being stuck inside a movie evokes not elation but
depression and a Major Tom–like inaction:

I’m sinking in the
quicksand of my thought

And I ain’t got the
power anymore.

In “Five Years,” after having received the news that the
Earth will soon die, Bowie sings, “And it was cold and it rained and I felt
like an actor.” Similarly, in one of my all-time favorite Bowie songs, “The
Secret Life of Arabia” (outrageously and ferociously covered by the late, great
Billy Mackenzie with the British Electric Foundation), Bowie sings,

You must see the movie

The sand in my eyes

I walk though a desert
song

When the heroine dies.

The world is a film set, and the movie that’s being shot
might well be called Melancholia. One
of Bowie’s best and bleakest songs, “Candidate,” begins with a statement of
explicit pretense, “We’ll pretend we’re walking home,” and is followed by the
line, “My set is amazing, it even smells like a street.”

Art’s filthy lesson is inauthenticity all the way down, a
series of repetitions and reenactments: fakes that strip away the illusion of
reality in which we live and confront us with the reality of illusion. Bowie’s
world is like a dystopian version of The
Truman Show, the sick place of the world that is forcefully expressed in
the ruined, violent cityscapes of “Aladdin Sane” and “Diamond Dogs” and, more
subtly, in the desolate soundscapes of “Warszawa” and “Neuköln.” To borrow
Iggy Pop’s idiom from Lust for Life
(itself borrowed from Antonioni’s 1975 movie, although Bowie might well be its
implicit referent), Bowie is the passenger who rides through the city’s ripped
backside, under a bright and hollow sky.